DNS-Based Internet Censorship and IPv6

I’ve been watching the #feb12 tweets on the movements in Algeria and Yemen. One of the most common types of tweets explains how to avoid the current censorship of Twitter, Facebook, and Google by directly entering IPs. This got me thinking – while it may be fairly easy to memorize and disseminate IPv4 addresses, what happens when we move to IPv6? Personally, I’ve had anywhere between 5 and 50 IPv4 addresses memorized at any point in time over the last decade. However, my own experience indicates that IPv6 addresses are significantly harder to memorize. In 10 years (ha!), when we’ll all be using IPv6, will it therefore be easier to use DNS-based censorship to restrict ‘Net access? Sure, we can all memorize 4-12 digits necessary to shell home, set up Google DNS, or make it to Twitter when DNS is unavailable or purposefully misleading. But will it be so easy when we’re faced with memorizing 16 alphanumeric characters?

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